Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser
Writer, Speaker, Strategist
Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser is a writer, political advisor, entrepreneur, and theorist in the fields of energy, transport, sustainability, climate, and regional development.
Full Profile
About Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser
Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser is writing on the changing relationships between technology, society and nature. He combines his natural science and social science background with public policy and business experience across various European cultures. A strategic thinker – with special expertise in energy, transport and spatial development policies – he aims to give practically useful orientation in navigating the present poly-crisis.
Ruggero has been following and inspiring the energy, transport, and sustainability debates in various roles for decades. He was an activist and a journalist, established his own think tank and played key roles in setting-up research institutes and foundations. As a consultant, he supported the development of the International Renewable Energy Agency and coordinated one of the last efforts to set up a large European PV factory before the collapse of the industry. He acted as a diplomat, co-founded multiple technical start-ups and is the author of many influential reports, books and articles in his areas of expertise.
In combining practical experience and theoretical reflection, Ruggero Schleicher-Tappeser is convinced that a historical perspective on the interdependence of society, technology, and nature is urgently needed. He aims to promote global cooperation and mutual learning to avoid the impending catastrophic deterioration of natural conditions for human life on Earth.
Talks
Shifting energy supply to solar electricity and abandoning the burning of fuels fundamentally changes how we source and use energy, making the system many times more efficient. While this seems to be the only way to provide sustainable living for ten billion people, the challenge to rapidly transform habits and ways of thinking older than the Greek myth of Prometheus is huge and causes fierce resistance.
Discovering properties and opportunities of electricity has been an adventure since the beginning of industrial development. Thermal and hydroelectric power plants have been growing in size while electric motors and illumination have provided increasing flexibility at the other end of the electric system. Huge investments have gone into essentially the same technologies of the supply system for over 100 years until the turn of the millennium. Since then, amidst fierce conflicts over who will control the future system, we are seeing fundamental changes which will inevitably promote electricity to be the dominant, universal energy of the future.
Hundred-year-old quantum physics has allowed us to understand nature’s laws reigning at the nanoscale level of atoms and molecules. Before the turn of the millennium microelectronics was the main technological application that started to change our lives. Since then, a wide range of nanoscience-based technologies are ripening rapidly. Photovoltaics, power electronics, electrochemical batteries and radiation-emitting semiconductor devices are the four main innovations ready to transform the energy world – provided they are embedded in a systemic approach reshaping the traditional framework of energy systems. The race between the worsening energy crisis and the worldwide adoption of this new paradigm may well decide over the fate of human civilisation.
PV is getting cheaper than all other energy sources. There are many misunderstandings as to why. A long history of doubts and resistance of incumbent powers explains its slow development after discovery. PV is different from traditional energy sources. Its strengths will transform incumbent structures and shift competitive advantages in the global economy.